Garmin Edge 305CAD

...had been hankering after a Garmin cycle computer to replace them ever since he found out about them! Finally, he took the plunge and shelled out £250 on the Garmin Edge 305 with cadence and heart rate monitor (cadence is RPM for your feet while pedalling, by the way).

It arrived a couple of weeks ago and after playing with it for a short while was promptly installed on one of his bikes. The 305 does absolutely tons of different stuff, ...
...more detailed than the standard Garmin map included with the package, which only seems to feature major roads.

It was pretty easy to follow the plotted route, and the map that he created also imported the information about elevation, so even though we hadn't cycled out that way with the Edge on, he could see the upcoming hills before we reached them. Didn't tell me about them mind, but I struggled up them none the less!

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My other half is what you'd call a keen cyclist - he cycles about 25 miles a day commuting to work, and frequently goes on weekend training rides too. He's got a couple of cycle computers that show things like the time, distance, speed, and similar, but had been hankering after a Garmin cycle computer to replace them ever since he found out about them! Finally, he took the plunge and shelled out £250 on the Garmin Edge 305 with cadence and heart rate monitor (cadence is RPM for your feet while pedalling, by the way).

It arrived a couple of weeks ago and after playing with it for a short while was promptly installed on one of his bikes. The 305 does absolutely tons of different stuff, and to be honest to me seemed to measure more things than you could possibly ever want to know about your riding speed and style. Heart rate monitor, cadence sensor, distance measured by GPS, altitude measured by a built-in barometer, calories burned, and so on (and on).

Anyway, he's used it pretty much every day since it got here, including 3 separate loops of his "weekend" 8.5 mile local hilly loop. Once you've ridden a particular course once, you can set the Edge to ride the same loop against yourself using your completed course time as a target. It's motivating to ride against yourself, and you can either have a ride profile view showing a black blob for your position and a grey blob for your "opponent", a map of the route showing your position and your opponent's, or a data readout giving you the distance you are ahead or behind yourself. I went out for a short ride with him, and spent the ride home being told how much behind or ahead we were of the out-going ride...so I suppose it could get annoying!

You can upload all the data from the cycle computer onto your computer when you get home, and the software that comes with it can be used to create more graphs of things than you'd know what to do with. For example, you can show your heart rate compared to the hill you were cycling up at the time, or your heart rate compared to any other bit of recorded data for that matter. Your heart rate is measured via the chest strap that comes with the Edge, which you need to wear while cycling if you want to record this data. You can also show your cadence varied against the gradient you were climbing. You can also compare any of those features between different rides, to compare your speed at particular points over the same route on different rides to see how you're improving.

There's a route planning tool that you can use on the computer too - Neil used it to plan our joint ride out to the library about 1.5 miles away (even though we both knew the way perfectly well already). The route wasn't planned using the software that came with the gadget, but using another programme (available here, if you're interested: http://www.bradculberson.com/cc/map.html) with more accurate mapping information - this uses Google Maps, a lot more detailed than the standard Garmin map included with the package, which only seems to feature major roads.

It was pretty easy to follow the plotted route, and the map that he created also imported the information about elevation, so even though we hadn't cycled out that way with the Edge on, he could see the upcoming hills before we reached them. Didn't tell me about them mind, but I struggled up them none the less!

The elevation info makes cycling almost like a video game, and you end up racing against your former self as a little grey blob on the screen. Although I'm not sure whether I personally would like it (I'd be falling behind myself far too often for comfort), Neil uses it regularly to compare rides. For example he recently ditched his pannier for a day, and discovered that his ride to work was about 6 minutes quicker as a result. So now he's making a definite effort to leave his pannier at home when possible, and seeing an increase in average speed and getting home that little bit earlier of an evening.

You can set alerts that go off while you're riding for time, distance, heart rate, speed and cadence. The first two alert you when you've ridden a specified time or distance. The other three can be configured with high and/or low thresholds. So if you want to do a "crunch the big gears" workout, you can have it alert you if your cadence goes above 60rpm. If you want to do a spinning workout, you can have it alert you when you drop below 80rpm, and so on.

The possibilities are endless, which if anything is the one downside of the thing - there are whole areas that Neil hasn't even looked at yet. The fact that virtually everything is configurable means that you can get it to do exactly what you want. But it'll probably take you a month to decide!

For example, there are two standard screens called Bike 1 and Bike 2 that you can switch between whenever you're riding. Each can have anywhere between 1 and 8 data fields, and each of those fields can display any one of 33 different bits of information. As you add or remove the fields, the Edge automatically resizes them to make best use of the space that's available to it. If you're interested in your average cadence or heart rate, you can have each of them for the last lap or your average for the whole ride. And your heart rate can be displayed as beats per minutes, percentage of your maximum heart rate, or as a heart rate zone.

For times, you can have the total ride time, the current lap time, the time for your previous lap, the average lap time for this ride, the time you've been stationary and of course the current time of day. You can also have the sunrise and sunset times at your present location, if you want them.

If you're interested in hills, it can display your current elevation, the current grade you're ascending or descending and the total climbed and descended in this ride. Plus there's the separate ride profile screen, which you can zoom in or out of as the fancy takes you.

You want to know your speed? Would that be your current speed, max speed, average speed for the ride, average for the lap, average for the previous lap, or your speed zone? Speed zones work like heart rate zones, and naturally you can configure them to be anything you like.

It just goes on. The good thing is that whatever you want to know the chances are that the 305 can display it. The downside is that you're slightly overwhelmed with options. You'll probably finish up with the maximum 8 data displays on the screen before realising that (i) this makes them all tiny and difficult to read at speed, and (ii) you don't actually need half of it.

Probably the most useful feature is the PC software that goes with the computer itself - Training Center. Neil is generally hopeless at recording and documenting data about his rides (and would freely admit this himself, promise!), even though he likes to look through data that's been collected and organised. Training Center tracks every bit of information about every ride, and files it all away neatly. It's then easy to come back and review progress, compare one ride against another, see whether you've become fitter or faster over the last few weeks or months, and so on. As an example of how the Garmin tracks what you've been doing, I can tell you that since getting this gadget, Neil has cycled for 238.17 miles, burning 17,591 calories along the way - climbing 9,241 feet during the rides and reaching a maximum speed of 38.1 miles per hour (I just hope there were no speed cameras nearby...).

For example, recently he did a flat out ride of 8.5 miles in just under 30 minutes. The following day he did a gentler ride of the same loop on his other bike, with the aim of staying within 70-80% of his maximum heart rate. Not only did the Edge make that easy because it beeped whenever he pushed too hard, uploading the data showed how the speed compared over the various sections, which threw up some surprising things, such as going up hills more slowly but pedaling harder going down them would improve overall times - something he'd never have picked up on without this kit.

One aspect that he's only just started to look at are the training programmes - you can programme almost limitless permutations of intervals, or a ride broken into distinct phases, or whatever based on time, distance, heart rate or cadence. For example, programming in an interval in which you ride hard for X minutes, followed by a rest interval which lasts until your heart rate is back to 65% max becomes trivially easy with the Edge.

There are two ways to record data. One is Per Second, where it records a "trackpoint" every second. A trackpoint is basically a record of all the stats at that point. Recording per second, the 305 can hold about 3.5 hours of data.

It also has Smart Recording, where it works out for itself when a trackpoint needs to be recorded and in practice that tends to be about every 5 seconds, so about 17 hours of recording. Garmin recommend using Smart Recording, and personally I'm not sure what the benefits of Per Second recording would be. When the memory is full, it automatically overwrites the oldest data, so you do have to download it to your computer fairly frequently.

In addition to the standard Training Centre software, Neil's signed up for a free basic account at MotionBased, and they also offer a subscription based "standard" account, which is a kind of super-sized version of the basic one. Garmin have recently acquired MotionBased, and if you upload your ride information from the Edge onto MotionBased, you can do even more analysis stuff, and access much better mapping information.

One of the things you can do on MotionBased is dot racing, where two or more of your rides along the same route are taken and raced head to head on the map. If someone has ridden the same course as you, then they can race against your ride (and vice versa if you spot a route someone else uploaded and you fancy a go at it yourself).

Something worth mentioning is that MotionBased doesn't seem to like the Per Second data recording that the Edge can do - I know that Neil had problems with that, and that was part of the reason he decided to use the Smart Recording feature.

The only downside (other than the MotionBased issue above) that I've heard Neil mention so far is to do with the cadence sensor that he got. It needs to have a little magnet attached to the crank, near the left pedal. The magnet is sticky backed and attaches with a cable tie too, to secure it. However after only a couple of rides, the sensor was almost falling off because it had come loose on the crank. It's now been firmly re-attached by means of superglue, which seems to be working so far, but it's definitely worth keeping a close eye on if you get one of these things. However this isn't unique to the Garmin cadence sensor - because cranks taper, all cadence sensors seem to have the same issue.

One potential issue with this kind of device is GPS reception - ie, it needs a GPS signal in order to work its magic. We haven't found it a problem so far, including rides in between tall buildings in central London and through country lanes with large overhanging trees. In fact, it even receives a GPS signal when it's inside the house as long as it's relatively near a window. An annoying thing is that when it's first turned on, it needs to get a satellite signal and this can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes, depending on the signal strength. Ideally, that needs to happen before you start riding, otherwise it can be recording inaccurate or missing position information.

Anyway, Neil certainly seems very happy with the Edge 305, and he's definitely pleased with how it's worked so far. It's a tad pricey at £250, but then he's not been buying travelcards to get into work for a couple of years now, and those savings soon add up (so far they've added up to a brand new bike, panniers, millions of cycling jerseys and shorts, SPDs and shoes, and so on, but that's another story!).

So, on that basis I'll recommend the Edge 305 too with a full five starts - it keeps him happy and amused, and although I've heard more than I ever thought possible about comparison rides and data and so on, I can live with that (secretly some of it is actually kind of interesting...) :o)

Other information:
There is a smaller brother to the Edge 305, which is the Edge 205. It doesn't support heart rate and cadence sensors, and has GPS altitude rather than barometric (so is less accurate when calculating hills), but is also about £100 cheaper than the 305.

www.garmin.com/products/edge305
www.motionbased.com
http://www.bradculberson.com/cc/map.html 

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